December 9, 2005
Free Web Site With House Purchase!
We listed our home for sale 6 months ago the conventional way, with a real estate agent. Six months later, after several price reductions and about 30 showings, we have gotten zero offers. We moved out 4 months ago, so the house is empty and I'm getting financially tired of owning two houses. If what you're doing doesn't work, trying doing something different.
I bought the domain 5419omaha.com and put up a web page describing our house, with pretty pictures. Having your own web page for your house is cool, because you can post things that listing agents don't normally post, like the house location and elevation accurate to within 10 meters. And you never know when a potential buyer might want to look at a satellite view of the house, so I put that in, too. The web site is:
I am figuring out a good way to list the house in the MLS (Multiple Listing Service), but with the web site we have a central contact point no matter what else we do. The domain will be posted on our front-lawn sign. If someone can't figure out how to browse to an Internet domain, then (begin snide comment) they probably can't afford the house anyway (end snide comment). Okay, okay, we'll include a contact phone number.
I tried to keep the write-up "normal", but some humor crept in despite my best efforts. I will have no use for this web site and domain after the house sells, so I figured, what the heck? Let's include the web site and domain with the house purchase! It's a gimmick, but hey - when conventional methods don't work, ya gotta try unconventional ones.
Since Christine is an ebay expert, I asked her to put a listing on craigslist.com. Then the very next day at work I saw a demo of some new Google map technology using AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML). The engineer used housingmaps.com as an example of placing overlays on top of Google maps. He moved the display over our town, and sure enough, there was a little balloon over our house for sale!
That was cool. Way cool!
Posted by Carl Drews at December 9, 2005 10:38 AM | FamilyI have been to the house and I can say as cool as the web site is, the house is even cooler still. It really is a wonderful home, and if the commute from Boulder to my place of employement in St. Louis wasn't so long, I'd snap it up in a heartbeat.
Posted by: Kevin Murphy at December 9, 2005 12:40 PM
